The W3C Technical Architecture Group (The TAG, http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/) is meeting in London at the offices of Mozilla at the end of this month. If you're a Web developer or designer with an interest in the future direction of the Open Web Platform, why not come join us for an informal evening of drinks and conversation about the Web and Web Standards? Learn about what the TAG is up to and help us help you.

I made a few snarky comments about Turbolinks recently and figured I should write down my thoughts more clearly.

If you're not aware of Turbolinks, it captures all local links that look like HTML pages, makes an Ajax request for the content, and then replaces the body with the response's body. It does a few other clever things, like extracting and replacing the title, and executing scripts in the response.

Overall, it's a clever way to get some increased speed while still using a traditional server-rendered-HTML architecture.

Caveats

Like any other solution, it comes with some caveats.

Probably the most important one is that normal HTML-rendered pages have their own clean global scope every time a new page is rendered.

This is not a mere quibble: a lot of existing JavaScript operates under the assumption of a clean scope, and a single DOMContentLoaded event. In a perfect world, popular JavaScript plugins would be architected to work well with a solution like Turbolinks, but the assumption of a clean global scope per server-rendered HTML page is baked into a lot of the JavaScript and jQuery libraries that people tend to use.

It is possible to deal with problems like this on a case-by-case basis (see https://github.com/rails/turbolinks/issues/87, for example), but in my opinion, this is going to end up in a game of whack-a-mole as each new patch breaks other valid use-cases.

At the end of the day, unless Turbolinks can perfectly emulate the browser's behavior, attempts to use Turbolinks with third-party JavaScript will either fail often or require an ever-growing library that handles more and more targeted edge-cases.

jQuery Turbolinks (https://github.com/kossnocorp/jquery.turbolinks) is a good example of something that tries to make the solution more transparent, but introduces problems as it now triggers ready callbacks multiple times, and idempotence is not typically a requirement of ready handlers. I encourage you to review the open and closed issues on these projects to get a sense of the specific kinds of problems that can occur.

The Good

That said, for applications that are willing to carefully think through the requirements of Turbolinks, this solution does provide a nice transitional way to keep building applications without a lot of architectural changes with improved speed.

If you are thinking about using Turbolinks, make sure:

• Your JavaScript is designed to be long-lived across many different HTML pages without a refresh• Your refresh handlers are idempotent. Don't register event handlers or other bindings in a refresh handler unless you reliably tear them down.• You audit all third-party code that you use to make sure that they do not rely on DOM Ready events, or if they do, that they DOM Ready events are idempotent. If you don't feel comfortable auditing and cleaning up third-party code, don't use any. (note that the "turbolinks community", such as it is, might vet existing libraries for compliance, and that would help).﻿

Earlier this week, I posted here about my distaste for the trend I've noticed of rewarding open source contributors for the volume of their software instead of the quality. I did that by quoting TJ, from a recent GitHub issue for one of his projects where a user was reporting data loss due to a bug.

The response was disappointing but not unexpected. Many people, instead of focusing on whether this cultural trend is good or bad, instead attacked me for attacking TJ (or just took potshots at Ember.js).

This was surprising to me, for two reasons:

1. TJ is an inveterate shit-talker2. I wasn't attacking him

He made an honest mistake that any one of us could have made, and I'm sure he's learned from it. I am not in the least criticizing TJ for what happened.

But I had been feeling uncomfortable with the culture of "release! release! release!" for awhile. I didn't have a particularly good argument against it. The bug that nuked /usr/local gave me what I had been looking for.

Let's be clear: there was a bug that caused data loss. The maintainer of the software that caused the data loss identified the reason for not properly reviewing the pull request: he had over 250+ open source projects.

Mikeal's argument, if I can do him the disservice of gross paraphrase, is that the rise of "amateurism" is happening anyway, so we might as well embrace it.

I appreciate his argument, and he may even be right. But I think that as communities, we can at least nudge the culture in the direction we'd like it to go. I think we've been doing a great job with it in our treatment of sexism, for example—making a conscious effort to change. I don't think that everyone is writing terrible software and we're all doomed. All I'm saying is that I've recently felt like we're rewarding the act of releasing software over the software itself. It feels, in some ways, like giving a trophy to every kid just for showing up.